Breathing is an icepick.

My life spools out from the end of this line of ink. A cloud of resistance packs its ice around my chest. Everyday I breathe, fight through it. It’s a quiet, rainy morning, the trees fall in an arc. Writing seems like the only option to reclaim my experience. How can I not feel my life? I seem to ask this again and again. Ideas spark large then dissipate, I must “chop wood, carry water”, to actualize them: Follow up on the tiny details, lists, phone calls. In this way, dreams are sieved out of thin air and become real. The “known world”, the conscious, has limited avenues. There’s an underground river, though, and I have a lamp-lit, rickety boat held together with gaffer tape, soapsuds and beads. It’s a leaky old thing, barely seaworthy, but the wood is thick. I keep dry on a rope bed suspended above the wet floor.